I'd like to play someone

[anand]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5

How's that for greed?

I think I'm going to need a bit of defensive strength myself pretty soon.

Although, in the past I've often been willing to face some pretty nasty attacks as long as I got a pawn out of it. Or, as a different way of putting it, "If I suffer I might as well suffer a pawn up!"

I onced browsed through a copy of Kmoch but can't remember much of it. I do know that some people consider it a classic though.

Actually, I think Kmoch's book might have some relevance to our game; I don't think he actually says anything about THROWING YOUR PAWNS AWAY!!

Glad you find our game worth looking at, Stormerne.

 

[Algernon Pondlife]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5


At last! clearly down

. uphill struggles can be their own reward

.

Seriously though. If all is clear to you I hope you are wrong.

I think I might just buy that book. But first I'm going to have to remember where I packed away half my chess books just in case I got it fifteen years ago and put it away for later reading and then forgot I had it

.

One book I do know I have is "Chess by R F Green price 1/-." That is how it is depicted on the front cover. It is dated 1894 and cost me £4 in a little bookshop near Norwich Cathedral nearly ten years ago. This is the opening paragraph (I hope you will find it interesting):

"The game of chess has of late years become so popular among all classes in this country, that any statement of its attractions is almost superfluous. Coming to us as it has, invested with every dignity and importance that antiquity can give, it has kept pace for more than five centuries with the most rapidly advancing civilization. Never forgotten in any country where it has once set foot, it has only been neglected when art, science and every intellectual pursuit have been neglected also. It has been for centuries the favourite recreation of the greatest minds; it has emancipated itself from every social restriction and surmounted every national custom and prejudice; it has survived every political change and every distraction of fashion, and is, today, more widely known and practised than any other game in the world. Who, in view of these facts, and making the slightest claim to culture, can afford to neglect it?"

The book starts from teaching the moves and works through all aspects of play, concluding with a selection of Master games and a chess bibliography.

------------------
That's not the electric light my friend, it is your vision growing dim

 

[anand]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5

Actually, I have no idea what the objective evaluation of this position is. It is very unbalanced; I just hope I'm not being led like a lamb to the slaughter!

That was a fun quote you posted; very 19th century.

Around two years ago, I saw a book by Howard Staunton dated c. 1840 -- I can't recall the title. "The Chessplayer's Handbook"? Something like that.

Anyway, it was amusingly old-fashioned. For example, he has a section on the rules of the game, where almost in the same breath he also tells you about the game's etiquette and creed of sportsmanship.

Some of the chess judgements are likewise "old-fashioned", e.g. he gives "1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. exd5! -- best." If only it was that easy to refute the French...

He notes that Bishops work well together, but that a single knight tends to be more powerful than a single bishop (!?).

He also presents the rather odd regulations of the London Chess Club (I believe)... I can't remember any particular examples, but he gives an elaborate and rather bizarre (to modern eyes) penal code for various over-the-board "offences". Something along the lines of, if player X makes an illegal move, and is made to take it back, and then makes another illegal move, then he loses the offending piece... or something to that effect.

I believe he also advises the reader to play for small stakes, since -- he says -- that heightens the excitement of the game!

He concludes with a section of Master games, but this is before Morphy, let alone Steinitz -- so most of the "masters" were unknown to me...

 

[Algernon Pondlife]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5 Qh5


I think I had an attack of nerves last time. Fortunately there was little choice of moves and so I did not go completely off the rails. Unbalanced and utterly unclear is how this position reads. Every move is an adventure and this is how I like chess to be.

For the opening I was following Donner-Miles but 10.Bd3 seems to be an improvement on ef which looked very clever because it allowed the Bishop to be developed on the back of another Queen tempo.

Green gives "Chess-Player's handbook" by Howard Staunton (1847; new edition 1889) "Careful elementary instruction. Code of laws. Analysis of chief openings. Treatise on end games."

An intersting historical point from the book is that descriptive notation is referred to as English or Philidor's and "is employed in this and other English and Latin-speaking countries". Algebraic is referred to as the German system "used in Germany and the northern countries generally".

There are times when I long for those days when there was so much still to discover and unorthodoxy was a land of opportunity. But of course, in reality only the the very best players successfully developed new ideas and there was just as much a collection of perceived wisdom about the game as today and (most of all) there was not the body of brilliant twentieth century "master" games to admire. This calls for a new thread:

------------------
That's not the electric light my friend, it is your vision growing dim

 

[anand]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5 Qh5
18. h4

I also like deviating from book, as long as the resulting position is interesting enough. I was not aware of Donner-Miles... my source for the opening was Nunn's Chess Openings, a one-book theory volume. Your 11..g5 was a novelty, it seems, but then coverage of this opening is extremely skimpy.

With respect to unorthodoxy in the 19th century -- as far as I can tell, chess orthodoxy was even *more* deeply entrenched in those days. For one thing, for most of the 19th century, at least half the games started 1. e4 e5. Later 1. d4 d5 was added as well, but it wasn't until the 1930's that we saw a real proliferation in openings and opening ideas...

In a sense there was more unexplored hinterland back then, but for the most part, it was dogmatically denounced as unsound! For example, 1. e4 g6 was called "the joke opening" by Alekhine, I believe.

 

[Algernon Pondlife]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5 Qh5
18. h4 Be4

I'm beginning to regret not thinking of 17... Nxc4 in time to play it. You would think that since I played the knight out there to overextend your Bishop I could at least follow through with it. Still we will see what happens.

I suspect Nunn is more recent than my book on the English Defence (Keene, Plaskett, Tisdall). Donner-Miles was a "made for TV" game. The BBC ran an excellent series called "Mastergame" in the late seventies.

I'm reasonably happy with 11...g5 at least for OTB since it seems to me that hurrying to castle could make white's strategy too easy with the clocks ticking and I'm not sure I understand enough to risk a central pawn move. It has the merit of cramping white's position since the knight is short of squares for a while.

I quite agree about nineteenth century orthodoxy. Ther are parallels with their understanding of physics for example where there was a prevailing confidence that all that was left was tidying up some loose ends. You can get a similar feeling from reading their histories as well, at least among British historians. I wonder if it stems from awareness of change, which was becoming more rapid and radical by then than it had generally been in earlier times, and thus we will show a similar naive attitude when people look back at our time.

By the way I tried the Modern for a few years but I gave it up when I realized how poorly I understood what I was doing. I kept finding that the flexibility of delaying Nf6 was overshadowed by my lack of restraint on white's development.

------------------
That's not the electric light my friend, it is your vision growing dim

[This message has been edited by Algernon Pondlife (edited March 02, 2001).]

 

[anand]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5 Qh5
18. h4 Be4
19. Nf4

I was considering 16...Nc4 for black...

11...g5 upsets the apple-cart, to be sure! It forces white to commit to a strategy, and it's fairly easy to pick the wrong one. I'm not so sure I didn't... <IMG SRC="http://forums.civfanatics.com/ubb/smile.gif" border=0>

That's a good point about 19th-century orthodoxy. In general I think they assumed that there was much less to know about a field than there really was. I'd add the example of Hilbert's quest for axiomatic completeness in mathematics, which of course was later dealt a fatal blow by Goedel's incompleteness theorem.

As for 1.. g6 -- I sometimes play it when I really want to win against 1. d4. It is less solid than my beloved Nimzo-Indian, but offers more promise of early initiative for black.


[This message has been edited by anand (edited March 02, 2001).]

[This message has been edited by anand (edited March 02, 2001).]

 

[anand]

By the way, it occurs to me that my last move might be termed "The Knight's Revenge"!

 

[Algernon Pondlife]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5 Qh5
18. h4 Be4
19. Nf4 Qxd1

"Knight's revenge" ouch!

My other idea could have been to push on to g4 and try to storm down the h-file. That just has to be playable. I suppose I assumed you had considered it before playng f4 and of course you can push in the centre then (maybe get your knight into d4.

When I was at school, I only ever played 1.d4 until, one day, I was crushed by the Nimzo-Indian. Even though my opponent was a strong player I knew it was my utter lack of comprehension that let me down. I didn't have the time to study this weird opening, and so I stopped playing 1.d4 for years. Eventually I started to play it myself, but I have never gone consistently back to 1.d4.

Now that I think of it I really ought to because for the most part it suits my game very well. It's a funny life!


------------------
That's not the electric light my friend, it is your vision growing dim

 

[anand]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5 Qh5
18. h4 Be4
19. Nf4 Qxd1
20. Rbxd1

It looks like I'm coming down with something... luckily, today's move doesn't require a whole lot of "processing"

The g4 idea was what I had in mind for black. After g4 I was looking at two moves for white: exf5 (exploiting the fact that black hasn't played h5 yet, so that Qxg4 is available on Nxf5) and d5. Of the two exf5 seems safer -- less chance of getting mated there -- but d5 seemed more promising.

You shouldn't have allowed a single loss to put you off playing 1. d4!! It is not so hard to cope with the Nimzo. You just need to find a single good line against it with white, one that suits your temperament. That reduces the entire dreaded Nimzo to just one line (or maybe 2-3, depending on how many choices black has).

(Just to clarify, I did not mean to annotate 1. d4 as being an excellent move -- although it is -- just to emphasize my words

)

 

[Algernon Pondlife]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5 Qh5
18. h4 Be4
19. Nf4 Qxd1
20. Rbxd1 Nac6

Not much point getting ill while you are winning

. Seriously though, I hope it goes away quickly.

It's quite possible that ef and d5 transpose since after d5 ed (although ...Na5 still looks playable to me) I think you have to recapture with the e-pawn.

I think what happened with 1.d4 is that I intended to go back to it once I had a little look at the Nimzo, but I got stuck on 1.Nf3 because it meant I was paying mostly fiancchetto positions with black and white (I played KID in those days and I have played Pirc since even before I knew its name).

Now I vary my white game between 1.Nf3 and the Sokolsky, but I have decided to add 1.d4 back in (I think I'll look at some Capablanca games as a starter!). Sometimes, of course, Nf3 transposes into a Q-pawn game and that suits me too.


------------------
I think we are in rat's alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

 

[anand]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5 Qh5
18. h4 Be4
19. Nf4 Qxd1
20. Rbxd1 Nac6
21. Bxe4 (if 21..fxe4, 22. d5)

Originally posted by Algernon Pondlife:

Not much point getting ill while you are winning<IMG SRC="http://forums.civfanatics.com/ubb/smile.gif" border=0>. Seriously though, I hope it goes away quickly.

Thanks. It is a cold of the sort I always end up getting, at least once per winter.

I always find fluid positions of the sort that occur after 1. Nf3 or 1. b4 to be extremely challenging. When playing, I always like to have a clear strategic plan before me, and the positions your openings engender tend to be anything but.

What I mean is that I always aim to transform the position, e.g. via a central pawn thrust followed by a timely piece exchange -- so as to obtain a static or long-term advantage, such as good B vs. bad B.

But in fluid, semi-closed positions such as the ones resulting from the KIA this is hard to do, so I end up spending a lot of time on each move as I consider all of the ways to "transform" the position.

I admire people who are comfortable with these KIA-type positions!

[This message has been edited by anand (edited March 04, 2001).]

 

[Algernon Pondlife]

1. c4 b6
2. Nc3 e6
3. d4 Bb7
4. e4 Bb4
5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Bc3+
7. bc3 Qh5
8. Nh3 f5
9. Nf4 Qf7
10. Bd3 Ne7
11. 0-0 g5
12. Ne2 h6
13. Rb1 Nbc6
14. f4 Na5
15. exf5 exf5
16. fxg5 hxg5
17. Bxg5 Qh5
18. h4 Be4
19. Nf4 Qxd1
20. Rbxd1 Nac6
21. Bxe4 fxe4
22. d5 Ne5

You've hit a few nails right on the head there. Considering my first love was the Queens Gambit, it is strange I've opted for such amorphous openings. Perhaps it was all that psychedelia and the dogmatic rejection of everything conventional I was mixed up with in the late sixties.

And yes, I find I take too much time too early in the game too often. I put it down to an indecisive nature, but of course a more structured opening could help quite a bit.

The other thing that occurs to me is that we sometimes forget that the game starts at move one. Because the recorded game normally comes labelled with an opening (which we usually recognize) we look straight at the pattern. But many a time there has been thinking going on from the very start.

This season, being my forst for a while, I have deliberately taken a few seconds over even my first move as white. Sometimes I am actually deciding which to play, but part of it is to get me settled at the board. Perhaps if I'm going to add 1.d4 to my repertoire, I will get into time trouble before moving

.

One of the things I admired about Tony Miles when I first followed his games, was his approach to the openings. It was as if he was saying "let's forget all this book rote. Let's see how well you understand chess". Playing the English Defense against the likes of Karpov is tantamount to a declaration of war. It was a case of psychology built on a deep understanding of opening theory. and there were a whole bunch of English players doing that at the time.

I found this web site: http://chess.liveonthenet.com/

It's where I got the Tartakover quote you should see below. It has a section on the Grob!

------------------
The tactician must know what to do whenever something needs doing; the strategist must
know what to do when nothing needs doing.

 

[anand]

20. Rbxd1 Nac6
21. Bxe4 fxe4
22. d5 Ne5
23. Bf6

I'm posting this from work (my company's dollars at work) so I'll have to make it short...

Hopefully later I'll be able to respond to what you said RE: amorphous positions.

 

[Algernon Pondlife]

20. Rbxd1 Nac6
21. Bxe4 fxe4
22. d5 Ne5
23. Bf6 resigns

not with a bang but a whimper

Well played

and thanks for the game. I enjoyed (most of) it.

Sorry for another oversight; I had been looking at ...Ne5 coming after ...d6 (not that that is fantastic anyway). But ever since h4 I've been staring at losing lines and it was just a matter of time.

You are free to take on Johan now, although he does not seem to be making any moves lately.

If anyone is watching, I'm happy to start another game now (either colour).

------------------
The tactician must know what to do whenever something needs doing;
the strategist must know what to do when nothing needs doing.

 

[anand]

I had overlooked Bf6 at first too. In fact, I stumbled on the whole d5 idea quite by accident...

Anyway, thank you for the game. It was an interesting one.

One thing I can say about it is that it was you who showed enterprising spirit and courage, whereas I just sat back and gobbled the material offered me with pacman-like mindlessness!

I think try to grab a new game now, although--as you said--Johan has not been especially active lately...

 

[Algernon Pondlife]

Just thought I'd pop back here for a moment to let you know the cryogenics worked out okay.

I am now a Prince 2 Practitioner or at least there is a certificate to say that I am.

I now have to go away and draw up a project mandate for my next civ game! And all moves will have to be sanctioned by a project bored.

------------------
"Ridicule can do much...but one thing is not given to it, to put a stop permanently to the incursion of new and powerful ideas"
-Aaron Nimzovitch

 

[anand]

Glad to hear it! Congratulations.

So your planning ability is now officially acknowledged... little do they know how devious your plans can be (the Pirc and the English defense! Very sinister)...